Here’s a photo from my Dalhousie Opera Workshop production of The Old Maid and the Thief. It shows Sarah Barrett-Ives (Laetitia — standing) with Julie Rudolph (Miss Todd — sitting).
Dal students handle Menotti operas with consistently clear voices
By STEPHEN PEDERSEN Arts Reporter Gian-Carlo Menotti, the composer of two of three short operas and librettist of the third on the Dalhousie Opera Workshop’s American opera triple bill till Sunday afternoon, died Thursday in Monaco. He was 95.
The Telephone and The Old Maid and the Thief, both relatively early works, are well-known bits of Menotti froth. Though minor comedies, they are often performed because they are fun. The DOW’s production, prepared by Marcia Swanston and directed by Nina Scott-Stoddart, fully live up to their reputation as first class operatic entertainment.
No one pretends Menotti was a major composer, but his gift for melody and his instinct for the stage were genuine enough. No other American opera composer is performed as often.
The singing of the 10 Dal voice students Thursday night was exemplary. All their voices were well placed. No one had to strain to be heard over pianist Dean Bradshaw’s ever-discrete accompaniment. The vocal quality was consistently clear and attractive to the ear throughout the evening.
Catie Shelley, who alternates performances with Becca Top, sang the part of Lucy, the young woman who never allows her life to interrupt her telephone calls (The Telephone). Yet she showed enough charm to make you see why Ben (Justin Simard) wanted so desperately to propose to her before he set out on an extended trip away.
As Ben, Simard had often to act in what the theatre calls “”dumb show,”" as background to Lucy’s animated conversations elsewhere. He is not only outstanding vocally, but is gifted with great timing and comic good sense: subtle, but projected to the back of the hall.
In The Old Maid and The Thief, as the handsome vagrant Bob who unwittingly becomes the obsession of both the Old Maid Miss Todd (Julie Rudolph) and the young maid Laetitia (Sarah Barrett-Ives), Simard again (no doubt with Scott-Stoddart’s help) finds a true comic-line, more humorous than farcical. He’s an innocent, whose shyness irritates Laetitia (”What curse for a woman, is a timid man!” she sings). But he does let us know how passionate he feels about the open road and the hallelujah of being a bum.
The interesting thing about these performances is how well the student singers have learned to integrate their characters with their voices. It’s exciting. Rudolph’s Miss Todd is severe and vulnerable yet easily induced by Laetitia to steal booze for Bob, though he repays her very shabbily by stealing her blind and running off with Laetitia in Miss Todd’s car. His excuse, like that of all unconscious sexists, is given him by the composer: “The devil couldn’t do what a woman can Make a thief out of an honest man.”
Kristi Assaly as the nosy Miss Pinkerton has the walk and the nervous manner of the town gossip as well as the barely containable delight of circulating news of bad behaviour. She shows a subtle but even more savage joy in rubbing Miss Todd’s nose in it, but only as directly as she dares.
The really good thing about these performances is that they all work. No-one overacts.
The middle opera, only eight minutes long, is Samuel Barber’s A Hand of Bridge, with libretto written by Menotti. A pair of married couples bid, lead, and take tricks with an occasional trump, but the game is secondary to their internal monologues. David (Josh Whelan) dreams of getting rich, while his wife Geraldine (Nathalie Thimot) obsesses over her sick mother; Bill (Leete Stetson) can’t stop thinking of a girl called Cymbeline, while his wife Sally (Melanie Marlin) has only one thing on her mind — buying a peacock-feather hat.
Thimot, in an unusually sweet vocal timbre, creates moments of pathos each time she sings. Hers is the only deep feeling expressed in the opera triple bill, and she touches us, although Miss Todd’s fainting spell at the end of The Old Maid and the Thief causes a passing wince of pity.
Opera fans can catch this same cast tonight at 8 p.m. in the Sir James Dunn Theatre. Friday night’s cast sings Sunday afternoon at 2 p.m.
Gary Ewer conducts (The Old Maid and the Thief), Dean Bradshaw accompanies at the piano.
On Thursday night, Dalhousie Music Department Chair Gregory Servant, and also professor of voice, presented Shelley with the Erik Perth Memorial Prize awarded annually to a female voice student with the promise and potential to become a professional singer.
